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Reference Paulsen, D.E., Li, H.-C. and Ku, T.-L. 2003. Climate variability in central China over the last 1270 years revealed by high-resolution stalagmite records. Quaternary Science Reviews 22: 691-701. What was done In the words of the authors, "high-resolution records of ð13C and ð18O in stalagmite SF-1 from Buddha Cave [33°40'N, 109°05'E] are used to infer changes in climate in central China for the last 1270 years in terms of warmer, colder, wetter and drier conditions." What was learned Among the climatic episodes evident in the authors' data were "those corresponding to the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age and...

Mesopotamian climate change Geoscientists are increasingly exploring an interesting trend: Climate change has been affecting human society for thousands of years. At the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in December, one archaeologist presented research that suggests that climate change affected the way cultures developed and collapsed in the cradle of civilization — ancient Mesopotamia — more than 8,000 years ago. Archaeologists have found evidence for a mass migration from the more temperate northern Mesopotamia to the arid southern region around 6400 B.C. For the previous 1,000 years, people had been cultivating the arable land in northern Mesopotamia, using natural rainwater...

Enlarge ImageThe vault. The sediments at the bottom of the lake in Northen Quebec's Pingualuit Crater hold unmatched clues to North America's climate record.Credit: Robert Fréchette / ARK; (inset) University of Arkansas SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA--A million years ago, a large meteorite smashed into what is now northern Quebec and created a crater that may become an unprecedented repository of data with which to study long-term climate change, researchers reported here this week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Canada and the northern United States are dotted with tens of thousands of lakes, most of them formed by...

People living in southern Germany during Roman times may have witnessed a comet impact 5,000 times more destructive than the Hiroshima atom bomb, researchers say. Scientists believe a field of craters around Lake Chiemsee, in south-east Bavaria, was caused by fragments of a huge comet that broke up in the Earth’s atmosphere. Celtic artefacts found at the site, including a number of coins, appear to have been strongly heated on one side. This discovery, together with evidence from ancient tree rings and Roman reports of “stones falling from the sky”, has led researchers to conclude that the impact happened in...

British scientists have deciphered a mysterious ancient clay tablet and believe they have solved a riddle over a giant asteroid impact more than 5,000 years ago. Geologists have long puzzled over the shape of the land close to the town of Köfels in the Austrian Alps, but were unable to prove it had been caused by an asteroid. Now researchers say their translation of symbols on a star map from an ancient civilisation includes notes on a mile-wide asteroid that later hit Earth - which could have caused tens of thousands of deaths. The circular clay tablet was discovered 150...

This page presents a summary narrative of and links to geological and paleoclimatalogical data bearing on the remarkable events of 3000 BCE (calendar years BC), when urban/technological society began. Most of ouromes from referenced scientific literature, although some of the studies, such as of the Mesopotamian delta,and certain sea level interpretations, are the author's. You will also find a handy chronological index HERE. A summary graph of events around 3200 BC will be found here.

Crater From 1908 Russian Space Impact Found, Team Says Maria Cristina Valsecchi in Rome, Italy for National Geographic NewsNovember 7, 2007 Almost a century after a mysterious explosion in Russia flattened a huge swath of Siberian forest, scientists have found what they believe is a crater made by the cosmic object that made the blast. The crater was discovered under a lake near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in western Siberia, where the cataclysm, known as the Tunguska event, took place (see map). On June 30, 1908, a ball of fire exploded about 6 miles (10 kilometers) above the ground in...

...the fall of the great Egyptian Old Kingdom may have been helped along by a common problem which remains with us now -- drought... a severe period of drought around 4,200 years ago may have contributed to the demise of the civilisation. Using seismic investigations with sound waves, along with carbon dating of a 100-metre section of sediment from the bed of Lake Tana in Ethiopia, the team were able to look back many thousands of years. They were able to see how water levels in the lake had varied over the past 17,000 years, with the sediment signalling lush...

**Update -- Intel Hub -- RSOE EDIS is reporting that a 1,000 strong search team was tasked with finding the impact area and so far have been unable to locate it... Such a colossal event, so little media coverage. Around 3:10PM Sunday afternoon residents of Colombia were awestruck when the clear sky was cracked open by a massive fireball that exploded upon impact leaving a 300 foot wide crater and a lot of rattled nerves.

Ancient mega-catastrophe paved way for the dinosaurs, spawned Australian continent. Planetary scientists have found evidence of a meteor impact much larger and earlier than the one that killed the dinosaurs -- an impact that they believe caused the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history.The 300-mile-wide crater lies hidden more than a mile beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. And the gravity measurements that reveal its existence suggest that it could date back about 250 million years -- the time of the Permian-Triassic extinction, when almost all animal life on Earth died out.Its size and location -- in the Wilkes Land...

The Search for the Missing Amazon Meteor Wed Sep 25, 9:27 AM ET By Diana Jong Staff Writer, SPACE.com The Araona people wanted $1 million before they would let the NASA ( news - web sites) scientists pass through their territory in the remote Bolivian Amazon. Given a budget of $20,000 for their entire expedition, the scientists resorted to negotiating, and the indigenous people eventually agreed to a payment of $500, plus 500 rounds of .22 ammunition and 200 D-cell batteries. "They couldn't be Eveready; they had to be Rayovac," recalls Compton Tucker, an earth scientist from NASA's Goddard Space...

Comets and disaster in the Bronze AgeCosmic impact is gaining ground as an explanation of the collapse of civilisations, writes Benny Peiser At some time around 2300BC, give or take a century or two, a large number of the major civilisations of the world collapsed. The Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, the Old Kingdom in Egypt, the Early Bronze Age societies in Israel, Anatolia and Greece, as well as the Indus Valley civilisation in India, the Hilmand civilisation in Afghanistan and the Hongshan Culture in China - the first urban civilisations in the world - all fell into ruin at more...

Scientists from NASA and the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., have identified what could be a supervolcano on Mars—the first discovery of its kind. The volcano in question, a vast circular basin on the face of the Red Planet, previously had been classified as an impact crater. Researchers now suggest the basin is actually what remains of an ancient supervolcano eruption. Their assessment is based on images and topographic data from NASA's Mars Odyssey, Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, as well as the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter.In the Oct. 3 issue of the journal...

Perusal of an article about Saddam Hussein's canal-building projects has led a scientist to a startling discovery about the mysterious collapse of Middle East civilisations more than 4,000 years ago. Sharad Master, a geologist at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, saw on satellite images of southern Iraq a large circular depression which he believes is a meteor crater. If confirmed, it would indicate an impact equivalent to hundreds of nuclear bombs, causing devastating fires and flooding in an area which would have been shallow sea at the time. The discovery could explain why so many early cultures went into ...

Thursday, 26 July, 2001, 12:12 GMT 13:12 UK Disaster that struck the ancients The pharaohs of the Egyptian Old Kingdom had built the mightiest legacy of the ancient world - the pyramids at Giza. But after nearly a thousand years of stability, central authority disintegrated and the country collapsed into chaos for more than a 100 years. What happened, and why, has remained a huge controversy. But Professor Fekri Hassan, from University College London, UK, wanted to solve the mystery, by gathering together scientific clues. His inspiration was the little known tomb in southern Egypt of a regional governor, Ankhtifi. ...

**SNIP** Many of his students who work to pay for their education and living expenses are complaining about being cut to 28 hours. “They’re saying they couldn’t pay their bills at 40 hours, so now they’re having to get a second job,” Diaz said. “That is the new trend.” But it’s not just restaurant workers and sales clerks who are feeling the squeeze. Universities and community colleges that rely heavily on part-time faculty have had to make the hard choice of cutting the number of classes they teach because the schools can’t afford to offer them health insurance.

Are Americans feeling the pain?

A meteor or comet impact near Quebec heaved a rain of hot melted rock along North America's Atlantic Coast about 12,900 years ago, a new study claims. Scientists have traced the geochemical signature of the BB-sized spherules that rained down back to their source, the 1.5-billion-year-old Quebecia terrane in northeastern Canada near the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. At the time of the impact, the region was covered by a continental ice sheet, like Antarctica and Greenland are today. Around this time, a global cooling began and the big animals in North America all vanished. Their human hunters, the Clovis people,...

New data from Greenland ice cores suggest North America may have suffered a large cosmic impact about 12,900 years ago. A layer of platinum is seen in ice of the same age as a known abrupt climate transition, US scientists report. The climate flip has previously been linked to the demise of the North American "Clovis" people. The data seem to back the idea that an impact tipped the climate into a colder phase, a point of current debate. Rapid climate change occurred 12,900 years ago, and it is proposed that this is associated with the extinction of large mammals...

<p>PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — Surrounded by engineers, NASA chief Charles Bolden inspected a prototype spacecraft engine that could power an audacious mission to lasso an asteroid and tow it closer to Earth for astronauts to explore.</p> <p>Bolden checked on the progress Thursday a month after the Obama administration unveiled its 2014 budget that proposes $105 million to jumpstart the mission, which may eventually cost more than $2.6 billion.</p>